Bus Rapid Transit

Photo: ITDP Africa/Flickr
The World Bank Group (WBG) is currently implementing a new approach to development finance that will help better support our poverty reduction and shared prosperity goals. This crucial effort, dubbed Maximizing Finance for Development (MFD), seeks to leverage the private sector and optimize the use of scarce public resources to finance development projects in a way that is fiscally, environmentally, and socially sustainable.

There are several reasons why cities and transport planners should pay close attention to the MFD approach. First, while the need for sustainable urban mobility is greater than ever before, the available financing is nowhere near sufficient—and the financing gap only grows wider when you consider the need for climate change adaptation and mitigation. At the same time, worldwide investment commitments in transport projects with private participation have fallen in the last three years and currently stand near a 10-year low. When private investment does go to transport, it tends to be largely concentrated in higher income countries and specific subsectors like ports, airports, and roads. Finally, there is a lot of private money earning low yields and waiting to be invested in good projects. The aspiration is to try to get some of that money invested in sustainable urban mobility.

This is the fifth in this year’s job market series.
By 2050, 2.5 billion people will move into cities with the vast majority doing so in the developing world (United Nations 2014). This has the potential to lift millions out of poverty by increasing the productivity of firms and workers who benefit from agglomeration. However, rapid and unplanned growth can lead to sprawling, inefficient cities with hours wasted stuck in traffic. Governments will spend vast sums on mass transit systems to reduce commute times (McKinsey 2016), but measuring their benefits is challenging. While individuals save time on any particular commute, their decisions of where to live and work will change as new alternatives become attractive and land and labor markets adjust. The lack of detailed intra-city data in less developed countries coinciding with the construction of large transit systems makes evaluating their causal impact even more daunting.

In my job market paper, I ask the question: how large are the economic gains to improving public transit within cities and how are they distributed between low- and high-skilled workers? I construct detailed data across 2,800 census tracts from before and after the opening of the world’s largest Bus Rapid Transit (BRT) system–TransMilenio–in Bogotá, Colombia. I develop a new reduced form methodology derived from general equilibrium theory to empirically assess TransMilenio’s impact on city structure and use this framework to quantify its aggregate and distributional effects.

Public exhibition at Gerezani BRT Station in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania on October 12, 2017.
(Photo: World Bank)

Many urban planners may know the success stories of Curitiba, Singapore or London realizing transit-oriented development (TOD). However, TOD is still very new in Sub-Saharan Africa. Although this concept of leveraging on major transit infrastructure to affect integrated land-use development for greater benefits may be gaining more recognition, there are few examples of successful TOD in Sub-Saharan Africa beyond a couple of South African cities, such as Cape Town and Johannesburg.

Dar es Salaam, the largest city in Tanzania with a population of 4.6 million, is expected to become a mega city by 2030 with a population over 10 million. However, its growth has been largely shaped by informality, coupled with a lack of hierarchy in roads and transit modes. It is increasingly difficult to get around the city without being stuck in traffic for hours. The complex and fragmented institutional structure of Dar es Salaam compounds the challenges, making management of the city complicated and less effective.

Is it possible to complete advanced contracting for the construction of Bus Rapid Transit (BRT) lines within two or three months and have the lines in operation within six months?

The simple answer is, yes.

The China Urumqi Urban Transport Project II, a US$537 million project, achieved just this as it looked to improve mobility in selected transport corridors in the city of Urumqi, the capital of the Xinjiang Province in West China.

On Monday, China officially launched the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB) in a ceremony with representatives from the bank's 57 founding-member countries. AIIB will have a capital base of US$100 billion, three-quarters of which come from within Asia.Infrastructure is a growing need for Asia,
and collaboration is critical to filling
gaps. Photo: World Bank
At the inaugural ceremony in the Great Hall of the People, Chinese President Xi Jinping reaffirmed the new institution's mission, saying that "Our motivation [for setting up the bank] was mainly to meet the need for infrastructure development in Asia and also satisfy the wishes of all countries to deepen their co-operation."

Indeed, the AIIB is a major piece of China's regional infrastructure plan, which aims to address the huge needs for expanding rail, road and maritime transport links between China, central Asia, the Middle East and Europe. But the AIIB should also represent a huge opportunity for cooperation not only between countries in the region but also with other multilateral development banks.

Our experience working on transport mega-projects co-financed by several multilateral development banks (MDBs) already shows that this collaboration is much needed and critical for the success and viability of mega-projects. The most recent experience with the Quito Metro Line One Project, for example, shows that the co-financing banks – World Bank, Inter-American Development Bank, Andean Development Corporation and European Investment Bank – brought not only their financial muscle but also their rich and diverse global knowledge and experience. Incidentally, because of the Quito Metro project, all the MDBs involved in the project were dubbed as the “musketeers, ” precisely due to the high degree of collaboration and team work that is making this project a success.

The World Bank has identified 34 countries that qualify as Low-Income Countries (LICs) for 2015. LICs have a per capita income less than US$1,045 per year, while the world average is US$14,307. These countries face important infrastructure gaps that need to be addressed in order to support economic growth and reduce extreme poverty.Cover of the "Value for
Money" report.
Design: Sara Tejada
Public-Private Partnerships (PPPs) have been an important option to develop infrastructure and services.

However, challenges for preparing, procuring and monitoring PPP projects in LICs are huge. Challenges include weak institutional capacity, constraints in fiscal space, shallow capital markets, and lack of access to long-term financing.

Despite these challenges, LICs have made important efforts to implement PPP policies, laws and regulations. As a result, these countries closed 377 PPP deals between 1987 and 2013. Even with this considerable effort, LICs still have important infrastructure needs. This is a good start, but hardly enough to tackle the problem.

During the project selection stage, LIC governments have to discuss whether a particular project should be implemented under a PPP scheme or through traditional procurement. There are several reasons why governments decide to implement a PPP: to accelerate public investment programs, maximize the fiscal space or to try to avoid fiscal controls, for example.

At this key decision point, various options can be considered by governments, including a Value for Money (VfM) analysis.

As many Colombian cities struggle to keep public transit ridership levels, one city is innovating using technology, gender-sensitive employment, and ideas from Asia to curb the “mototaxiing revolution” and restore ridership loss.

Moto-taxis in Sincelejo, Colombia. Photos: Leonardo Canon

An increasing“motorbike revolution” – represented by spectacular increase in motorbike motorization and reliance on door-to-door motorized services – has changed the rules of the game and cannot be obviated in transport systems.

Flicking through the Uber website, we found that the company used to offer an “UberMoto” service in Paris from 2012 to 2013. Meanwhile, on the other side of the Atlantic, the local Colombian newspaper headlines discuss the legislation forbidding male passengers on motorcycles in a number of cities in an effort to curb moto-taxis.

The impact of motorbikes cannot be ignored. Purchase of motorbikes and operation of moto-taxis have been identified as key drivers for a modal shift from public transit to private vehicles in many places around the world, including Colombia. The nationwide phenomenon of moto-taxis has revolutionized mobility in small and medium-size Colombian cities, and has become a source of income for many.

As traffic congestion continues growing in urban areas, more and more cities have realized that investment priority should be given to public transport modes, such as metro trains, bus rapid transit systems (BRT) or buses, instead of personal vehicles. Simply put, public transport modes are more efficient than personal vehicles in terms of carrying and moving people around. However, international experiences also tell us that building more metro lines or putting more buses on the road alone may not be able to get more people to use public transport modes.

There are several non-transport factors, or urban design factors, that play a critical role in a traveler’s decision on their best travel mode.

The first critical factor is density. As illustrated in a famous study done by Alain Bertaud, a former World Bank staff, density is the primary reason why 30 percent of daily trips are carried out by public transport in Barcelona, but only four percent in Atlanta. Barcelona is about 30 times denser than Atlanta, so it is therefore much easier to provide same level of public transport services in Barcelona than Atlanta.

One lesser-known factor is accessibility. Just having a high population density may not guarantee more people to use public transport.

Every year, more than 1.2 million people die in traffic crashes worldwide, equivalent to nearly eight Boeing 747 plane crashes every day. As developing economies grow and private car ownership becomes more mainstream, the number of associated crashes and fatalities will continue to rise.

The challenge of traffic safety often flies under the radar in cities, where the social and economic challenges of accommodating growing populations take precedent. Without meaningful change, however, the World Health Organization (WHO) projects that traffic crashes could become the fifth leading cause of premature death worldwide by 2030. This takes a particular toll on cities, which are already home nearly half of global traffic fatalities. City leaders must prioritize traffic safety measures to ensure that their citizens have safe, healthy and economically prosperous cities to call home.

With Urban Growth Comes Traffic Safety Challenges

While there are a number of factors that contribute to traffic crashes, two of the primary challenges are rising motorization trends in cities worldwide and the issue of road equity: the most vulnerable road users, including pedestrians and cyclists, are most impacted by traffic crashes. On top of that, these users, typically lower-income, don’t always have the power or capacity to create the necessary changes.

The number of privately owned cars on the road hit the one billion mark for the first time in 2010. If we continue business-as-usual, that number will reach an estimated 2.5 billion cars by 2050. All of these new cars will lead to an increase in traffic congestion in cities worldwide, increasing the probability of traffic crashes and resulting fatalities.

A few weeks ago, a video entitled “Why doesn’t TransMilenio work?” created a huge buzz among the residents of Bogota. The graphically impeccable video, produced by local Colombian firm Magic Markers, proposes solutions for addressing the systematic overcrowding problem faced by the city’s Bus Rapid Transit (BRT) system known as ‘TransMilenio’. It is based on research conducted in 2012 by a university professor, Guillermo Ramirez, and his students. The video has been watched on YouTube over 700,000 times and has been discussed by important national media outlets.

As urban transport experts and Bogotanos interested to see TransMilenio improved, we wrote a blog post in Spanish breaking down the video between the points with which we agree and the points with which we disagree, and circulated it in social media to further promote the debate. We are now sharing that blog post in English as we believe it offers some interesting discussion points about the challenges of high capacity BRT operations that are relevant in a broader context.